What's TOTALLY COMPELLING about good newsreaders?

[David Eppstein]

In article <bhsbmd$rv5$1 at panix2.panix.com>, aahz at pythoncraft.com (Aahz) 
wrote:

> In article <slrnbk3c1i.2nv.bignose-hates-spam at rose.localdomain.fake>,
> Ben Finney  <bignose-hates-spam at and-benfinney-does-too.id.au> wrote:
> >
> >Brandon accesses comp.lang.python via Usenet, not email.  His
> >X-Newsreader header shows he is using Outlook Express.  I don't know of
> >any newsreaders that can allow you to filter on the person(s) to whom
> >the current post is responding -- nor any email clients with the
> >facility, for that matter.
> >
> >The "References" header could theoretically allow you get that
> >information, but it would be expensive to do so for every message,
> >especially in long-running threads.
> 
> Supposedly gnus and slrn do that, though.

MT-Newswatcher has no problem with filtering on References:
I use it to make sure I see replies to my own messages,
but I have a distinctive string on the user side of my message-ID's.
Brandon doesn't seem to, but does seem to use a distinctive host:
ID-203719.news.uni-berlin.de.

Googling for that, it seems that the only other stuff you would lose by 
killfiling references containing that hostname would be his six-way 
crossposts to alt.atheism, alt.politics.bush, alt.fan.noam-chomsky, 
soc.culture.iraq, soc.culture.jewish, soc.culture.russian, and 
soc.history.war.misc... Some people are still saying he isn't a troll?

-- 
David Eppstein                      http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/
Univ. of California, Irvine, School of Information & Computer Science